Whispering of the Deaf

Ibrahim Rugova, Fehmi Agami, Veton Suroi, and Bujar Bukosi flew to Washington on Tuesday, May 26, where they were supposed to meet with Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright.  American diplomat Richard Holbrook promised this meeting to Rugova as part of the structure of negotiations concerning the meeting of Kosovo’s Albanian leaders with Slobodan Milosevic.  The basic purpose of this meeting was for the United States, which according to the certainty of Kosovo’s Albanians is the “sole force” that can facilitate a dissolution of the crisis, to demonstrate that they only trust Rugova’s negotiating team.  This should urge Rugova’s negotiators to attend the second meeting scheduled for May 29, after the first meeting with the Serbian government’s delegation which a good part of Kosovo’s Albanians lived through as “further facts of concessions to Milosevic.”

The Serbian government’s delegation to the meeting with Kosovo’s Albanians landed at Pristina airport half an hour before noon on Friday, May 22.  The first meeting of the negotiating teams as scheduled by Milosevic and Rugova was supposed to begin at ten o’clock that day, but fog at the Slatina Airport prevented the airplane’s departure from Belgrade.  Upon arrival in the capital of the province, the delegates led by Ratko Markovic, vice-president of the Serbian government, first went to the building of the provincial government in which Markovic had previously waited unsuccessfully on fourteen occasions for the Albanian representatives.  Afterwards, they were taken to the Writers Association of Kosovo building, which is also the office of Ibrahim Rugova’s Democratic League of Kosovo.  Talks began at one o’clock in the afternoon and went on until five o’clock with only one short break.  The entire time, American ambassador to Macedonia, Christopher Hill, sat in a room adjacent to where the talks were held.  “Whenever a problem came up, the Albanians knocked on the door, looking for advice,”  later stated Mahmut Bakali, member of Rugova’s negotiating team.

A question of milk:  Up until Thursday evening, it wasn’t clear that the first meeting of negotiators would take place.  The meeting planned for Friday, May 15, had already come into question for the first time on Sunday, May 17, when a joint communication from Veton Suroi, member of the Albanian negotiation team, and Bujar Bukosi, head of the Kosovo Albanian government in exile, was read on Albanian television.  “There’s no point to beginning negotiations, if Belgrade doesn’t undertake measures to fundamentally change conditions in Kosovo.”  Afterwards, Suroi began talking about the fact that the Contact Group, whose eight leaders are from the most developed countries in the world, decided in a meeting in Birmingham (May 16, 17) to delay the prohibition of investment in SRJ as a possible obstacle to the talks.  “Milosevic is rewarded after only one meeting with photojournalists, but for the threat of sanctions a massacre was required,” said Suroi at that time.

According to the agreement between the two leaders, it was overlooked that the negotiation delegations were to meet once a week in Pristina as well as that the building in which they speak be alternately determined by the Albanian and Serbian sides.  This almost became a stumbling block, because the Albanian delegates, who were first in line to determine the meeting place, first sought that the place of negotiations be the building which houses the American Information Center in Pristina in order to emphasize the existence of foreign influence in the dialogue.  But, they quickly abandoned this exaggerated demand.

At the beginning of the talks, the fact that trucks loaded with supplies were prevented from entering Kosovo was brought into question—which was introduced almost immediately following Rugova and Milosevic’s meeting.  Under the guise of “regular control of traffic and the prevention of smuggling,” the police returned around 100 semis loaded with food from the Kosovian “border”.  For six days, the blockade permitted only two trucks loaded with milk intended for the army and the police to pass through, reported Beta.  Finally, on May 21, only one day before the talks were to begin, the blockade was called off.  After the first round of talks, Richard Holbrook announced that that would be the final obstacle to the beginning of the talks and to prevent the military commitment of American officials.

On Tuesday, May 19, Christopher Hill was in Pristina at a meeting of Rugova’s G-15 advisory team.  There, they informed him of the Albanian side’s objections.  The next day, he presented them to the government’s negotiating team with whom he met in Belgrade.  On Thursday, May 21, Hill once again found himself in Pristina at one more meeting of G-15 (will we really have to look at the Holbrook-Gelbard Balkan tour in miniature before the next round of talks?).  The meeting began early in the morning, but was quickly interrupted because the advisor’s weren’t able to decide.  It was arranged that they would meet again at seven that evening.  During the break, journalists considerably infuriated Hill, who said that “there had been enough talk” and that he wants to see a real advance.   At the session, it was decided that the Albanian team would come to the negotiations due to the fact that at six o’clock in the morning, the first trucks were permitted to enter Kosovo.

Inventory of disagreement:  The actual Pristina negotiations aren’t imagined as political negotiations concerning the solution of the Kosovo question, but rather as preparatory talks about how the talks will unfold and what conditions are necessary to permit that they take place at all.  But slowly, last Friday they just talked about who and what the preparatory talks would deal with.  The question of “where” definitely looked removed from the daily agenda, but the question of the precise time table remained for the next meeting.  It was agreed that they can negotiate within a narrow and wide structure such that both sides can change the structure of the team (at the suggestion of the Serbian side presumably) according to desire.  It was decided that both sides would chose one member of the team through which both teams would keep in contact.  It was also established which terms they would talk about, and in which order.   When it was a question of conditions for the existence of contact, they spoke about “measures for the establishment of trust” and measures of trust.  After all, Ambassador Hill announced before and after the talks that success in the eradication of weapons from the conflict in the province was expected above all.  Both sides explained how they see conditions in the territory, and what they ask of the other side in addressing it.  Both delegations listened to what the other side had to say and took note of it.  It was agreed that every week the negotiators would inform each other about what they had done.  After the meeting, all participants agreed that “the differences are still so great” that it was a success that the meeting was held and that another one was planned for Friday.  “They didn’t agree to anything else,” says one political observer from Pristina.  Ratko Markovic counted as a success that the team contained themselves and listened to the to the other side rather than seizing them by the throats.  “The talks were held in a tolerant atmosphere and open to the disclosure of different opinions.”

War in trust:  But, the “security situation” that everyone worries about is much worse.  In recent days, Serbian villagers from the area surrounding Klina have joined the conflict, defending their villages from attack as some Serbian sources state.  The KIC, near to the DSK, states that the Albanians in the villages around Klina abandoned their homes which were looted and afterwards burned “by Serbian police and armed citizens”.  Around the villages of Smonio and Ponosevac near the border , the involved Yugoslav army is waging a war with Albania.  There the UCK (Kosovo Liberation Army) even began to threaten the supplies of watch towers on the border.  Daily there are a few casualties on both side which are well known, but more and more people vanish or are kidnapped.

What can both sides do in the talks to make the violence stop?  The state of the Serbs, as demonstrated everyday throughout the homeland, is in complete control of the police as the federal government is in control of the military.  Veton Suroi, member of the three member heart of the Albanian negotiating team, asked on May 23 that Serbian forces halt the “offensive action” on Kosovo.  The state, however, maintains that the first measure of “trust” is for the Albanian leadership to condemn terrorism.

Both sides ask the impossible from the other.  The leaders of Kosovo’s Albanians can’t permit themselves to condemn the armed struggle.  That would only be possible if the UCK officially accused them of treason and in that way were completely removed from the scene.  In reality, it is clear that without the crisis actually provoked by the UCK, there would not have been today’s negotiations.  The stronger UCK might at some point send their own political representatives to take the place of today’s “pacifists,” but for now, Rugova sits at the table with Milosevic.  Albanian leaders have set aside everything in order to openly accept this new reality.  Fehmi Agani, in a May 15 interview with Zagreb’s Vecerni List,  said that, “(he) doesn’t agree that UCK is a terrorist organization,” and that it, “enjoys less sympathy among Albanians.”  As for the Serb side, it will be difficult to permit the cessation of “offensive actions” because they are already essentially on the defensive.  Perhaps the police can undertake some action before they are attacked, but the “normalization of conditions” which the Albanian side seeks is impossible without the ceasing attacks upon the police undertaken by the UCK everyday.  When he called for an end to the “offensive action” of the Serbian side, Suroi explained that that would be made possible if the political establishment of Kosovo’s Albanians through “moral authority” influenced the UCK to do the same.  Suroi states that this moral authority is strong enough for something like that.

Otherwise, it looks as if the basic obstacle to any kind of agreement concerning an end to the violence is still the fact that not all involved parties are sitting at the negotiating table.  The Albanian side, without representatives form UCK on the negotiating team, can only promise with difficulty to stabilize the situation.  The Serbian side knows it, and uses it to drag out the attainment of an agreement.  On Tuesday, Tomislav Nikolic said that Albanian negotiators are truly “in subtle form” and “condemned terrorism” at the May 22 meeting.  Until that detail is disclosed publicly, even if it were found to be true, as long as they keep quiet about the essential contents of the planned talks, it will not make  it easier for Rugova’s negotiators to attend the next meeting.

In the  political circles of Kosovo’s Albanians, every one loudly demands that Rugova invite UCK representatives to the negotiations, and the UCK itself demands that in one of it’s communiqués. “Rugova must pay attention to the UCK and its political representatives, but at the same time he doesn’t have to be connected to those opinions,” said Fehmi Agani in a May 21 interview with Sarajevo’s Dnevni Avazi.  Therefore, for now, it isn’t known who that political representative might be, but the Albanian side in the negotiations can guarantee only a little.  On the Serbian side, which doesn’t have to change anything until the Montenegrin parliamentary elections are over, Rugova’s weakness agrees with them (as always).  For that, the second meeting of Markovic and Agani’s teams (even though Tomislav Nikolic “expects it to be successful for both sides”) will already exceed all expectations and repeat the “success” of the first meeting.